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Plague Labs, Birthday Guests, and a Tank That Never Was
A Siberian laboratory, a former German chancellor, and a Franco-German armored vehicle walk into a bar. Only one of them was real.
1. CHECKS COMPLETE, CAUSE UNKNOWN
Russian authorities announced that all safety checks following the death of Siberian plague lab worker Darya Shipilova are now complete. They have not, however, determined whether she died of plague.
This is how you close an investigation in the same sentence you decline to open one.
2. BIRTHDAY DIPLOMACY
Gerhard Schröder attended Vladimir Putin's birthday celebration at the Russian leader's home, a fact reported by the Kremlin with the quiet pride of a man who has stopped wondering what his neighbors think. Schröder is a former head of government for a NATO member state.
Every other diplomatic channel in Europe costs money, staff, and plausible deniability; this one apparently just needed a cake.
3. THE TANK THAT UNITED NO ONE
France's top general has acknowledged that the joint Franco-German main battle tank program is dead — finished off by years of delays, industrial disputes, and political tensions so sustained they themselves became a kind of industrial output. The program was meant to demonstrate what European defence cooperation looks like when it works.
It demonstrated the same thing, slightly differently.
4. THE THIRD YABLOKO
Elena Perepelitsa, a Russian liberal politician from the Yabloko party, has been sentenced to four years in prison for donating to a Navalny-affiliated organization. She is the third Yabloko member jailed in under four months.
Yabloko, for the uninitiated, is the party that has spent thirty years proving that a loyal opposition can exist in Russia — and Russia has spent this year proving the same point from the opposite direction.
5. FORTY DAYS, HAUNTING ON SCHEDULE
The Kremlin noted this week that Zelensky's earlier threats of a forty-day operation against Russia are now, in the Kremlin's words, «coming back to haunt» Ukraine — its residents, its cities, its industrial sector. The statement was issued as a form of retrospective satisfaction, the diplomatic equivalent of saving a receipt.
A forty-day threat was made, forty days passed, and the party that issued the communiqué is confirming the outcome. Somewhere in a press office, someone filed that under 'vindication.' The residents of the cities being haunted filed it differently.